Juanita J. Chinn, Ph.D. is a sociologist and demographer in the Population Dynamics Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), where she directs the Demography of Health, Demography of Health Disparities, Human Morbidity and Mortality, and Population Composition programs. Dr. Chinn co-chairs the NICHD Maternal Health Coordinating Committee, serves on the trans-NIH UNITE initiative to identify and address structural racism, and served on the Federal Interagency Working Group for Research on Race and Ethnicity. Before joining NICHD in January 2017, she was the HHS Office of Minority Health's Health Disparities Fellow at the National Center for Health Statistics where she led efforts in stimulating health disparities research and programs. Her areas of expertise include racial, ethnic, and nativity disparities in health, morbidity, and mortality; infant and maternal health; women’s health; data policy; social demography; acculturation and assimilation; and the social determinants of health.
Dr. Chinn earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology, with a specialization in demography, from the University of Texas at Austin. She trained as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. She holds an Sc.B. in applied mathematics and psychology from Brown University.